Ignited by Ruthie Knox

CHAPTER ONE
    Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight.
    Bleary-eyed and yawning, Ashley watched Roman out the window of the Airstream as he curled up into one sit-up after another.
    Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four.
    Quiet Pennsylvania morning. Dark green hills rising beyond the cleared patch of campground. Roman, punishing himself.
    She’d only started counting a minute ago, but the sweat at the neckline and under the arms of his new workout shirt said he’d been at this for a while. The army calisthenics pamphlet from the surplus store lay facedown on the picnic table bench beside him.
    It was enough to make a girl feel a little guilty about her pajama-clad voyeurism.
    Fifty-nine. Sixty. Sixty-one.
    The rhythm of the repetitive movement sank down inside her. The way his body curled up, then released. The perfection of him.
    Every time he came down, his elbow brushed against the rainfly of his new tent, making it jitter and shed dew. With the exception of its color—bright green—the tent in no way resembled the model they’d admired on the floor at REI yesterday, where they’d gone to find Roman a shelter after he refused to sleep in the Airstream.
    Or, rather, it looked like that floor model would have if Sasquatch had come along and stepped on it.
    Any normal person would stop and shift his sleeping pad an inch to the left to keep from knocking against the nylon, but Roman didn’t. Maybe the moisture felt good against his flushed skin. Or maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to stop once he’d started. For any reason at all.
    Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Eighty.
    Unease lifted her feet onto the upholstered bench and wrapped her arms around her knees. He ought to have been sexy doing this—the curve of his biceps, his clenched jaw, feet planted, quads tense as he came up and lowered down again and again, slow and controlled.
    But just how long had he been at it?
    Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. A hundred.
    Come on, Roman. Give it a rest.
    He didn’t. Even when she opened the Airstream’s door and walked down the wet metal steps into the silence of the morning, he kept going.
    “Morning.”
    He grunted without breaking rhythm.
    She found a dry spot on the picnic table to sit. The grassy islands of Shamokin Campground were silvered with dew. The snack machines by the office hummed quietly. Roman rose and fell, implacable as the sea.
    They’d rolled in last night late and taken this site in section H, the end of the loop closest to the office, moving stealthily in the hope that they wouldn’t wake up Stanley and Michael or any of the paying customers. Not that there were a lot of those—just a tent camper over in the primitive section and an RV in one of the loops with electrical but no water and sewer hookups.
    The office door opened. Stanley came out with his coffee mug and sat at the concrete table where he liked to watch the bird feeders.
    She lifted a hand and waved. He nodded, an economical acknowledgment across the thirty feet separating them. Very Stanley—he wasn’t the type to make a fuss, even when old friends dropped in on his doorstep without warning. He would come over and say hello, but not until he was good and ready.
    The trick to loving Stanley was that it was important not to push him into anything. Or try to get him to talk when he didn’t feel like it.
    Or make him do anything he didn’t want to do, actually.
    The trick to Stanley was to just wait, and watch, and find out what he would accept.
    “How many sit-ups are you planning to do?” she asked Roman.
    “Five hundred.”
    She picked up the calisthenics pamphlet. Her eyes scanned the instructions, but there were no counts on the page, just exercises. Roman was providing his own targets.
    Five hundred sit-ups. Yeesh .
    “Where are you at?”
    “Four-oh-eight, four-oh-nine, four-ten,” he said, and then blew out an audible breath that she took to mean Piss off and let me do my thing .
    “All right. I get it. I’ll leave you to your